Oh, that was your idea before you implemented what's now on the wiki.
(iirc both because of balance of amount of weapons as because of it being unfair that exotic has to pay to get infantry weapons, but I might be misremembering that)

My intuition says they'd probably stop falling by hitting the inside of the shield. If you caught them falling from a significant height, you could make soup. (Actually I'm not entirely sure the shield would hold in that case)

Okay so in that case it's not useful to save anyone from falling, but is useful for stopping things from falling. (And if you wanted to make people soup... just let them fall all the way to the floor )
I think the shield would hold in most cases though - since it withstands some weapons fire and you need to fall from 5-50 metres to have the same kinetic energy as one bullet (depending on the gun)

Sudden wondering: does the TARGET helm affect infantry psi amps and some of the other psi weapons (like the fire ball thingy, not my wacky stick of course)? Technically it "should" because they're technically ranged but it never occurred to me that it would for some reason